Triple Exposure

by Colleen Thompson

  “You have yourself a good day,” she said.

  Moments after she drove off in her gray Impala, he looked up to see the tow plane and the glider. As the red-and-yellow craft shrank from his vantage point, he told himself that there was no sense dawdling, that Rachel would be fine now.

  That she had left her problems—him included—far below.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,

  And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

  Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth

  Of sun-split clouds,—and done a hundred things

  You have not dreamed of…

  —From “High Flight,”

  by Pilot Officer John Gillespie Magee, Jr., RCAF,

  shortly before the occasion of his death, at age 19

  Rachel released the tow rope and then smiled at the perfect separation. As the Pawnee wheeled to the right and downward, its engine noises fell away, leaving only the rushing of the air she sliced through. She pushed open the sliding window to her left and stuck her cupped hand outside the canopy to allow the cool wind to push it upward like a tiny, auxiliary wing.

  Her father and his assistants had done a fine job on the restoration. The sailplane responded with elegant efficiency as she turned beneath a thick cloud where large birds circled. Her heart leapt eagerly as the glider’s long wings caught the thermal. Gaze flicking to the merry upward spin of the altimeter, she allowed the events of the past hour to fall away beneath her. The tense silences with Patsy, the threat of the phone call, the combustion of an unexpected and spectacularly reckless kiss: she left it all behind to think of later.

  For now, she soared with a pair of red-tailed hawks tumbling playfully beside her. Below, the blue shadows of huge clouds slid across the desert landscape, offering her details missed in the bright, reflected sunlight.

  And in that instant, she understood that this vantage, this play in contrasts had informed the vision she applied to terrestrial camera shots. Slipping through the skies, as much as countless classes and the years she had apprenticed with others had made her the photographer she was.

  It was an unexpected realization, since flying was the thing she’d always taken for granted, the life she had returned to by default. She’d come reluctantly this time, troubled by the idea that every minute she spent in the air took her a minute farther from her dreams of succeeding in her chosen field.

  But it didn’t have to be an either/or proposition. She would sharpen her photography skills by reclaiming her place beside her father. And it was no betrayal if she loved her time spent airborne almost as much as he did.

  Buoyed by the thought, she looked forward to an afternoon of soaring—a plan she altered when a spark of distant lightning caught her eye. Though still miles off, the storm was clearly moving her way.

  She was sorry to end the flight so quickly, but long ago, her dad had made her promise never to risk a tangle with a tempest. An experienced glider pilot friend of his—a man Rachel had met a few times—had misjudged the weather and been sucked into a thunder cell, where his fragile craft was snapped to pieces by its winds. It had taken days to find the wood-and-cloth wreckage in the desert, weeks more to find the broken body where it had landed miles away.

  Rachel remembered having nightmares in the months after the crash took place. Tumbling through space, through stinging hail and bursts of lightning, she’d awakened in a cold sweat, time and time again.

  Yet she knew this storm was still miles off, so she felt no panic or particular hurry as she reduced airspeed and guided the sailplane toward the landing strip. Once again, the old German glider responded dutifully, and she knew a moment’s selfish pleasure that she had been the first to fly the phoenix since its resurrection.

  It was the last conscious thought she had, less than fifty feet above the runway, before a loud crack gave her a split second’s warning. Her canopy snapped up and back, some piece flying from it to slam into her face. The shock of the blow knocked her head to the right and eclipsed her vision with a splash of red-and-black pain. Blinded, she felt the glider’s nose drop like a rock.

  Panic slicing through her, she hauled back on the stick. A wingtip was first to touch the tarmac, first to snap and spin the craft to the left. Yet instead of flipping, the glider’s wheels struck hard and slid sideways, bumping roughly as something on the underside gave way with a crunch.

  With the sound of splintering, the sailplane shuddered, snagged, and jerked to an abrupt halt. Rachel sat stunned, her pulse roaring in her ears, her surprise at her survival so overwhelming she couldn’t think, react, or feel pain. Until she reached up to clear the hair and blood from her eyes and touched—oh, God, what was that—on her forehead.

  Screaming, she fought to get out, forgetting the harness that strapped her into her seat. Screaming for what felt like an eternity before she heard someone shout her name.

  Zeke joined all those running, pounding toward the spot where Rachel’s sailplane had come to rest. Panic careened through him as her shrill cries reached his ears, but screaming meant she was alive. Meant that at least the impact hadn’t killed her. Zeke passed several other people as his long legs picked up speed, but he noticed one man, the man who had been smoking outside the jet hangar, running in the opposite direction. Probably going to call an ambulance.

  Zeke saw the twisted canopy, saw the snapped wingtip propping up the damaged plane. Spotted Rachel’s father bending over her, with Lili Vega pale and panting right beside him.

  Rachel’s screams faded to groans, and Zeke caught his first glimpse of her face, masked in streaming blood from a deep gash on her forehead. The sight drew him up short and slammed his heart against his ribs.

  Walter Copeland handed Rachel a folded cloth out of his pocket and put it in her hand. “Press this to that cut, Rusty, and tell me where else it hurts.”

  “There was a crack,” she cried, “and then the canopy just flipped back. Something flew off. Hit me in the face. I couldn’t see, but—Why on earth would it fail like that?”

  “Forget about that now.” Despite the emergency, his voice was firm and calm. “Just settle down and think a minute. Does your back hurt? What about your neck?”

  “No. No. Just here.” With her free hand, she gestured toward the wound that she was blotting while Lili stepped aside to take a call on her cell phone. “Help me get out, will you? Could you unhook the harness?”

  “Hang on a minute,” said her father.

  Lili snapped her phone shut. “Bobby’s called an ambulance. Maybe you shouldn’t move until they get—”

  But Rachel was already struggling free, assisted by her father. Trembling violently, she swayed on her feet—with Walter’s steadying hand on her arm—as she turned to survey the damage to the sailplane. “It’s wrecked, Dad. All that time and work, and it’s—”

  “I don’t care about the damned plane,” Walter told her. “Planes can be restored, replaced. Not daughters.”

  “You’re alive, Rach,” Lili stressed. “It’s a miracle you and the plane both didn’t end up smashed to pieces. If you hadn’t leveled it at the last second—”

  Rachel took a step or two before sinking to the runway, her left hand still pressing the cloth to her forehead. “I could really use something for a headache right now.”

  “Maybe you should lie down,” her father suggested. “Lie still until the paramedics come to check you out.”

  “I—I’ll be all right,” she told him. “Just give me a few minutes.”

  “Might have a concussion.” Though Zeke hadn’t meant to speak up, the concerned comment slipped out before being echoed by several others who had shown up.

  But Rachel, hearing Zeke’s voice, looked up at him, a question mingling with the pain in her eyes. Was she surprised that he’d come running with the others? Did she still believe—even after the kiss they’d shared at the table—that he felt nothing toward her except anger over the ph
otograph she’d taken?

  They didn’t talk—there were too many people around for him to call attention to himself with conversation. But he stayed anyway until the ambulance arrived and two men checked her vitals.

  “Can you tell me what today is?” asked a heavyset paramedic whose name tag read Garza.

  Rachel correctly answered two or three such questions before losing patience. “Can’t you just give me some aspirin?”

  “You’re going to need a few stitches, minimum, to close up that cut,” Garza pointed out, “and after what you’ve been through, I’d strongly advise a thorough examination at the hospital. But it’s up to you. If you don’t want to go—”

  “She’s going,” said her father.

  Rachel blinked rapidly, and beneath the streaks of blood, her pallor stood out. Either she was feeling worse, thought Zeke, or she had the good sense to realize arguing would do her no good.

  “You stay awake,” said Garza’s partner, a blond kid who looked only a year or two past high school. But he sounded concerned as he said, “Don’t go passing out—or puking in the ambulance if you can help it.”

  Zeke edged closer, unable to keep his distance. “Take care of yourself,” he said.

  “I’ll try,” Rachel murmured as she was loaded for the half-hour drive to Alpine.

  Before the ambulance doors closed, Walter Copeland covered the receiver of the cell phone he’d been using and said, “Patsy’s on her way. Soon as she gets here, we’ll meet you at the emergency room.”

  “She doesn’t have to come.” Rachel’s voice was strained. “I’ve put her out enough lately.”

  Walter grimaced. “She wants to, Rachel. She was pretty upset when she heard.”

  “About the hospital bill, most likely,” Rachel answered before the ambulance doors swung shut.

  “Hell of a way to get the last word, Rusty,” Walter groused as the vehicle rolled away, lights flashing. Turning, he brushed past Zeke on his way to join Lili. Bobby appeared from a nearby hangar to meet him.

  By this time, thicker clouds had rolled in and thunder rumbled uneasily around them. As the first chill raindrops plunked down, the remaining onlookers dispersed, save for Zeke, who lingered, as Walter and his employees looked over the wreckage.

  The wind carried snatches of their conversation to him.

  “I know we checked those canopy hinges and the latch—I checked and double-checked them personally.” Bobby spoke quickly, clearly agitated. “How the hell could they have worked loose on that short flight?”

  “Never seen anything like this before,” said Lili. “Never even heard of it.”

  “Don’t touch anything,” Walter told them. “The NTSB will be sending a team to try to figure out what happened, whether it was a parts failure—”

  “Or their usual ‘pilot error’ bullshit.” As the rain picked up, it popped against the glider’s fuselage and partly obscured Bobby’s irritation. “She was ready for this, Walter. I’ve watched out for her same as you have, and she was—”

  Reluctant as he felt, Zeke made himself step forward. “Someone threatened her today. At The Roost, she picked up the phone. Rachel said it was a woman who’s been calling her.”

  Walter looked up, jaw gaping, apparently surprised to see him still there, or possibly to hear him, since in all the years the two men had lived in the same town, they had only passed a few words. “One of those damned cranks from Philadelphia?”

  “Rachel thinks she’s here now, in Marfa. She heard a train over the phone, and we could hear it at the same time from town.”

  Lili looked skeptical. “You’re not suggesting—?”

  “You know, I saw a stranger around earlier,” said Walter. “A fellow I’ve never seen before, hanging out over there.” He cocked his head in the direction of the jet hangar.

  “I saw him there, too,” Zeke offered. “Leaving the area while everybody else was rushing this way. I figured he was calling for an ambulance.”

  “Could it have been a woman?” Lili’s voice rose with excitement. “Could she have just been posing as a man?”

  Bobby narrowed his blue eyes, looking murderous. “What did this guy look like?”

  Zeke thought for a moment. “White and in his forties, I think. Brown hair with hardly any gray, a little longer than yours. On the thin side, like a runner’s build, but definitely male. Hard to say about the height. Maybe five-ten or six feet or so. Wearing—um—nothing that stood out much. Dark jeans, I think, with a blue shirt.”

  Walter wiped the rain from his face. “He was smoking when I saw him.”

  Lili’s eyes flared and she snapped her fingers. “I remember seeing him, too. I thought he must be one of the bizjet people, since he didn’t wave when I did. But I didn’t think anything of it because he had this look, like he belonged.”

  “More than likely, he did,” Bobby said. “Lots of people come and go around here. Place might be small, but we don’t know all the new folks.”

  “If he called for an ambulance, maybe he left his name,” Walter suggested. “I’ll check into it later. But there’s Patsy, with the car. I need to go and see about my daughter. If you two—” he glanced from Bobby to Lili “—could put a tarp over the cockpit before it gets soaked and get the Transportation Board to send a Go Team, I’d appreciate it.”

  “Just let us know how she is.” Bobby clapped his boss’s shoulder. “And tell her she’s in our prayers. I’ll cancel the Odessa flight. I’ll be here if you need me.”

  Lili opted for a tight hug. “She’s going to be all right, Walter. But you call us the minute you know anything.”

  Zeke wished he had a phone—or enough of a claim on Rachel to warrant being kept informed. He reminded himself that he’d set up his life as a loner on purpose—the lust-spawned kiss they’d shared entitled him to nothing. Less than nothing.

  But it wouldn’t stop him from worrying about her or from wondering if her accident had been an accident—or the work of either the stranger at the airport or the anonymous female caller, who had traveled all the way to Marfa to threaten Rachel’s life.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Interoffice memorandum

  Presidio County Sheriff’s Department

  To: Deputy Leo Varajas

  From: Sheriff Harlan Castillo

  In the matter of the phone harassment complaint by Rachel Copeland, please follow up on these items:

  Contact Philadelphia P.D. Det. Daniel Howell regarding any records of threats from friends/family members of Kyle Underwood. Can Howell check whereabouts of poss. suspects?

  Question Patsy and Walter Copeland—domestic stress over Rachel’s reappearance? Any concern over finances?

  Because of widely circulated porn images allegedly of Rachel Copeland, question Presidio County sex offenders w/Web access and history of stalking.

  Routine background check—Zeke Pike. Previous addresses? Prior complaints, esp. those involving females?

  Check w/National Transportation Safety Board investigators re. final determination of the cause of glider incident.

  Saturday, March 8

  “I heard you’d been in an accident, and I wanted to check on you.” Even on the telephone, Dr. Damien Thomas’s rich baritone reminded Rachel of a grandfatherly James Earl Jones.

  But today she wasn’t in the mood for soothing. She turned away from the bright window, resenting the pathologically chipper volunteer who had earlier opened the blinds as a “surefire cure” for her gloom.

  “I’m doing a lot better, should be released today. But how did you find out about it?” She couldn’t imagine that her father would have called him.

  “Marianne Greenberg, your new attorney, mentioned it while we were discussing that ridiculous lawsuit.”

  Rachel’s stomach spasmed. Ten million freaking dollars, and here she was, still in the hospital running up bills after two full days.

  “She called you about that?” Rachel had spoken briefly to Greenberg yesterday, but the Philadel
phia-based attorney hadn’t brought up Dr. Thomas. Probably, Greenberg planned to call the psychologist as a witness, as had Rachel’s previous lawyer in the criminal case. The psychologist was both well respected in the community and an advocate for violent crime survivors—Thomas wouldn’t tolerate the word “victim.”

  “She wanted to discuss this latest set of photos. Rachel, I think we ought to talk about—”

  “I told Ms. Greenberg I don’t want to talk about those pictures. They’re fakes just like the others. They have to be.”

  “I sincerely hope you’re right about that,” he said gently, in a tone that warned her he meant to once more broach the subject of what had happened after the dinner with her students, an evening she had forgotten. She told herself it must have been the flu, the same illness that had left her sick for days afterward, nauseated with a pounding headache, her muscles aching. So what if those same symptoms corresponded with the side effects he’d mentioned, of a drug sometimes slipped into the drinks of the unsuspecting? Lots of things could cause a person to feel lousy, and anyone could pick up a few unexplained bruises.

  Her mouth went dry and a fresh throb hammered at her temples. She didn’t want to think about this.

  “But, Rachel, if these turn out to—”

  “I’m not feeling well, Dr. Thomas. I appreciate your concern, but I don’t think I should be on the phone now.”

  A long pause followed, weighted by almost-paternal disappointment. When finally he spoke again, his voice was firm. “I’m very concerned for you at this point. Your accident—is it possible you were distracted, upset about being forced to face this situation?”

  “No. The trial won’t be for months and months. Ms. Greenberg told me that much. And besides, I don’t see what my distraction could have to do with the canopy popping open.”

  “What if you didn’t latch it properly? Worry takes a lot of mental energy; it’s fatiguing. And denial, even more so.”